Published 4:00 am, Thursday, October 12, 2006

When Hans Reiser appears in an Oakland courtroom today on charges that he killed his estranged wife, Nina, prosecutors will be moving forward even though her body hasn't been found.

The lack of a body in a homicide case is rare, but there have been plenty of instances in which murder defendants have been convicted through circumstantial evidence alone, legal experts said Wednesday.

Sources close to the investigation told The Chronicle on Wednesday that police believe Hans Reiser, 42, killed his wife at his Oakland hills home on Sept. 3, the day she dropped off the couple's two children.

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Nina Reiser's blood, confirmed through DNA testing, was found at his Exeter Drive home and in his car, the sources said. Court records show that Nina Reiser, 31, last lived at the home in March 2001, several years before the couple separated.

Hans Reiser, a computer programmer, is expected to be charged today with murder. He refused to speak to police after his wife disappeared, and he declined to make a statement to investigators after being arrested Tuesday at a friend's house in East Oakland, police said.

"There is no pool of blood in any location," said his attorney, William Du Bois. "They're talking about traces of biological evidence, and when people live together for years, it's not uncommon for them to deposit trace evidence."

Du Bois, who met with his client in jail Wednesday, said, "He's saddened, of course. If you were arrested in connection with the death of your wife when they haven't even found her body, how would that make you feel?"

Prosecutors can proceed in a homicide case without many things, including a confession, a motive or a body, said Contra Costa County prosecutor Harold Jewett, who oversees homicide and gang cases.

"There's certainly no requirement in the law that a body be present, any more than there's a requirement in the law, for instance, that a murder weapon be produced," Jewett said.

But not having a body does present prosecutors with challenges, such as proving to a jury that the supposed victim hasn't run off or somehow faked his or her death to start life anew.

"You've got to have evidence to defeat that," said Steve Wagstaffe, San Mateo County chief deputy district attorney. "In a no-body case, you have to convince the jury that the victim is truly dead and not simply a runaway."

To do that, investigators often introduce evidence showing that a missing person has stopped making phone calls, sending e-mail, or using his or her credit and ATM cards.

"I think more damning would be like a $40,000 bank account that has not been touched, and very close friends and family haven't heard from them," said Oakland criminal defense attorney Deborah Levy.

In the case of Nina Reiser, friends and family have insisted that the Russian-born gynecologist would never leave her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter.

Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Tom Rogers said, "There have been numerous cases successfully prosecuted throughout the state and in the country where a body has not been recovered."

In Contra Costa, prosecutors won a first-degree murder conviction in 1994 against a man who kidnapped and killed a Navy civilian worker whose body was never found. In 1986, a man was convicted in San Mateo County of murdering his former fiancee, whose skeletal remains were found 14 months after the trial ended.

In Sacramento County, Mario Garcia is now being tried on murder charges in the October 2005 disappearance of Christie Wilson, 27. The two were caught on videotape leaving a casino in Placer County. Wilson's body hasn't been found. The trial was moved to Sacramento because of pretrial publicity.

Nina Reiser's boyfriend, Anthony Zografos, and mother, Irina Sharanova, maintained hope Wednesday that Reiser would be found alive. They unveiled billboards with her picture and reward information in hopes of finding her.

"But regardless of whether this is a search-and-rescue or search-and-recovery operation for the police, Nina is still missing," Zografos said. "We've got to find her."